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Admin (1 edit)

The “Most Recent” tab on the games browse page has a substantially smaller impact than you think. You can review your analytics to your project to looks for “/newest” in the URL to see if you are getting any traffic from those pages. Based on our analysis of our analytics globally, those pages do not generate substantial traffic to specific pages because too many projects are published regularly. So, just so every reader is clear: Do not depend on the “Most Recent” page as a place for your game to get discovered, as it will be seen by very few people there. Instead, focus on building your audience.

Ok but that does not seam to always be the case there are games that…

There are other factors that may contribute to how pages show up on Most Recent, and how they are considered for our internal popularity ranking. Unfortunately we do not share the specifics of how these work, since we want to discourage people trying to “game” the system. This is part of the reason why any sort of “bump” that may take place is never directly in your control, and we want to discourage developers from counting on things like that. Long term it’s better to work on expanding your audience using the all the tools available to you. We do not want developers to have the misconception that some human reviewer is responsible for the success of their project, that is just not the nature of how the system works.

I see that many devs are making new project with every update

This is not something we recommend. If we believe they are creating multiple pages to get a boost in popularity then their account may be penalized. Do not try to cheat the system.

I to note a few things specific to your page:

  1. If we were doing curation on your blog post, we would not consider it something for promotion. Your blog post is mostly empty with just links to a Patreon page. Saying it’s version 0.1 to 0.2 is meaningless to anyone who is looking at the page who has no pre-existing knowledge. The goal of our devlog curation was to encourage the creation of high quality posts, but yours would not fulfill our requirements for that
  2. Your page currently uses external links for files. Although it may not impact things now, we strongly encourage you to host your game on itchio. That we we can guarantee you actually have provided a functional game, and scan it for viruses. In the future we may consider then in our ranking algorithm, but we will put out a notice about it.

Hope that helps

(2 edits)

Thank you for the explanations. And yes that reply answered my questions. I do think that a game having a new major version out is worthy of being bumped up in the ranking but it is what it is.

The only thing I will point out is that my dev blog beside link for patreon have a screenshot showing what new content is added to the game in terms of images/animations/words, those are the main things players want to see in terms of dev blog/changelog about game updates (for a VN). But in the same time yes it could be better if I have added text with more details about the update, beside the information already on project page, and that's something to improve for the future.

And on "butler" the main reason at least for me to avoid it is the 1gb limit which the game will eventually reach (then I have to manually request more space) and obviously its convenient to just drops the links I already have uploaded for the patreon page. But switching to butler is something to think about in the long term, its just not a high priority right now.